-
The missing apple in your car
Apple Inc. has conquered many areas of our personal and professional lives. Indeed, our homes are increasingly full of Macs: we use iPods for listening to music, iPhones for making phone calls and of course the iPad is making itself known in areas we couldn’t even imagine just a short while ago.
But there is one area where Apple is still conspicuous with its absence and that is the car. I guess we could venture to speculate that Steve Jobs just isn’t that interested in cars and is thinking that Apple shouldn’t be bothered. Perhaps that’s true but we regularly see photos of his fancy Mercedes captured in various places in Silicon Valley.
There can be no doubt that the automotive industry is huge business with around 60 million cars sold worldwide in 2009. Increasingly, electronics is playing a part of that to the point of being a critical part of the purchasing decision. I recently talked to a manager at AGMC, the BMW agency in Dubai and the Northern Emirates and he said that customers are looking at what digital and electronic gear is on offer when deciding what to buy. It’s safe to assume that will only keep growing in importance.
Fact remains that Apple is really nowhere to be seen in terms of the electronics that’s built-in to cars. There are plenty of options for connecting an iPhone or iPod to a car’s system but Apple offers nothing that car manufacturers can put in from the factory. In contrast, Microsoft is very active with their Automotive platform, which goes into Ford’s Sync. Sync you can get in select Ford, Lincoln and Mercury models. Recently I had the pleasure of test driving a Ford Taurus with Sync and although it was a good experience I can’t help but feeling that Apple could do better.
However, I doubt that Apple will venture into car-electronics even though they could do amazing things in this space. A friend of mine put a Mac mini in his Mini Cooper some years ago. With a small touch sensitive LCD screen in the dashboard, he could control most of the car’s system from the Mac. For sure, it was a great way to start a discussion at parties but it was also surprisingly functional and useful. More recently people have mounted iPads in cars, which may not be as useful but pretty cool nonetheless.
Arguably the automotive industry is one of the few remaining areas that Apple Inc. has left to conquer. Whether they will or not, only some minds in their Cupertino campus knows. I will just say, “watch this space” as there may be some interesting developments ahead.
This article was originally published in Khaleej Times.
